If you were an auditor asked to examine the human resources records of CNET (parent company to ZDNet), you'd discover that even though the company was officially founded in 1992, that there's a handful of employees whose hire dates actually precede that year. My colleague Dan Farber is one of them.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft finally released the beta of Office Live Workspace (OLW) -- an offering that many see as as Microsoft's response to the pressure its flagship Office suite is getting from browser-based competitors such as Google (with Google Apps), WebEx, and Zoho.

How many times have you stared at the bottom line of a spreadsheet that's full of formulas knowing exactly what figures should be there, only to find that there's a different set of numbers staring back at you than the ones you expected.

Last week, while in California, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rajen Sheth -- the man at Google who is credited with coming up with the idea of Google Apps. That interview, along with a demo of some of Google Apps' more novel features, can be viewed in the attached video.

I rarely get e-mail from the USA Today's Byron Acohido (who from time to time interviews me for my opinions on tech). But today, Acohido drew my attention to a story that he has co-authored with Jon Swartz under the headline FTC under fire as credit bureaus sell consumers' data.

Last week, while in California, I made the rounds, capturing on video as many interviews as I could with interesting people that would be fun to hear from. One of those was Google Gmail product manager Keith Coleman who, in the attached video, gives us a status update on where Gmail has been, where it's at, and where it's going (showing us a thing or two in the current user interface along the way).

While at Bebo's launch event yesterday in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with David Glazer, the director of engineering at Google who is overseeing the evolution of the OpenSocial framework that the company announced on November 1, 2007. You can see the interview in the attached video (above).

With so many tech vendors claiming their solutions to be green and looking for a leg up with customers wanting to be more power efficient with everything from their servers right up to their entire datacenters, one big problem in the industry is a lack of standards on how "green" is meaured and what the lexicon is from one discussion (or solution provider to the next).

Taking care of the planet seems like such a big job that sometimes, it seems like it's relatively impossible for us to really make a difference on an individual level. You hear about big issues and how, for example, if we all lowered our carbon footprint by just a little bit, the cumulative impact on the earth could be extraordinary.

Last week (and just in time for any big holiday buying you plan on doing), David Carnoy who works over at one of ZDNet's sister organizations (within CNET) published what he's calling the final word on 720p vs. 1080p: the two "competing" resolutions for high definition (HD) television.

With Web 2.0 being the rage that it is, Web-based productivity software from the likes of Google, Zoho, and WebEx appears to be getting all the buzz while Microsoft which has so far eschewed the idea of a Web-based offering.

In case you missed the episode of the Dan & David Show that my colleague Dan Farber and I recorded this past Tuesday (early, because Dan is off to Taipei), one of the news bits we discussed was Adobe's 90 percent price drop on its high-end Flash Media Server. It wasn't until we brought the topic up in the middle of the podcast that the ramifications of that price drop really hit me.

Like Apple's iPods and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) from which they can so effortlessly acquire their content, the transparency of the automation and infrastructure that makes Amazon's Kindle work so effortlessly with the Amazon.com Web site is a marvel in terms of the user experience.

For those of you who have been around long enough to experience some of the earlier PDAs based on flash memory like Palm's initial Pilot and later, devices like the iPaq that were based on Microsoft's PocketPC operating system, then you'll remember what a drag it sometimes was when those devices became so inoperable that you had to issue what is known as a hard reset to return them to a functioning state.

Today, Adobe announced the third versions of its two Flash Media Servers: Flash Media Interactive Server 3 and Flash Media Streaming Server 3. While the two servers represent a range of improvements to both products, the most significant of those improvements are the built-in support for H.

As you can see from this past Friday's "unboxing" video, I received for review a Kindle ebook from Amazon. In that video (and its accompanying blog post), I had some initial thoughts on the Kindle and now that a full weekend has passed I have a lot more to say.